World renowned artist has gallery show in Colorado Springs | Arts & Entertainment
Installation artist Patrick Shearn is thinking big about going small.
In his inaugural gallery exhibit, “Psycullescence: Patrick Shearn,” the Black Forest native riffs on macro photography — close-up photos of small subjects.
“It’s a whimsical, playful exploration, as if you fell down a microscope and were walking among macro photography of bacteria and funguses,” said the artist, who lives in Elbert, where he operates his creative arts and design studio Poetic Kinetics. “I love playing with scale. I started messing with the idea of being that small and exploring that world and what it would be like.”
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The immersive, experiential installation opens with a free reception Thursday in Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery at Ent Center for the Arts and runs through March 15.
Shearn, who has spent his career making enormous installations, was inspired by the sort of macro photography found in the popular science magazine Scientific American.
“Like when they do an expose on some new camera system that lets you do macro, super close-ups of worlds we can’t see,” Shearn said. “And the quality of light generated in that environment has always intrigued me. I’m very nature inspired, so it’s what would that stuff look like, how would it spread itself out, what does it leave behind, how does it decompose?”
Think “Innerspace,” the 1987 film where a character is miniaturized in an experiment, injected into the body of another human and zooms through his veins.
“It’s like that, like looking at blood corpuscles,” Shearn said. “I made a bunch of those and created an environment where you see stuff like that. It’s playful and fun.”
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Four of his new pieces are 12 feet tall and sculptural. Some are kinetic. There’s also a crystalline environment featuring large-scale crystals, made from corrugated polycarbonate and wrapped in Saran Wrap. A series of smaller pieces will represent the trees from his Enchanted Tree series, which he’ll install in the 16th Street Mall in Denver in April.
“I started thinking about walking into a gallery space, and I wanted to break the traditional mold of stodgy things on walls and obtuse text,” he said. “I wanted to open your mind and find your child state and come play.”
Inhabiting a gallery space is new to Shearn, who left Colorado in his early 20s and returned to the Black Forest area a couple of years ago. After film school in New York City early in his career, he wound up in Hollywood, where he made animatronics and other creatures for the movies. Those dinosaurs and monsters in “Jurassic Park” and “Interview With a Vampire?” His. And the visual effects in “Fight Club” and the last two “Twilight” movies? Also his.
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From there he moved into immersive, experiential, public art installations for famous festivals like the desert art party Burning Man, where he deposited an 80-foot aerial boom lift decorated like a flower, and music festival Coachella, where his “Helix Poeticus,” a giant snail created around a variable-reach forklift, crawled its way across the fields.
The large-scale, kinetic marionette show he was asked to do for the 2008 Beijing Olympics was a hit, as are the current creations in his Skynet series — kinetic sculptures that move in the wind, inspired by the natural murmuration of starlings, as they move together as one. He drapes the nets across swaths of cities, like 2016’s site-specific and guerrilla-style “Liquid Shard,” which covered 1,500 square feet of Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. The shimmery nets also have become popular at botanic gardens around the U.S., including Atlanta Botanical Garden and New England Botanic Garden.
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